Friday, December 28, 2012

I have been a journalist nearly all my adult life: since 1978, when, having
just turned 24, I took my first job as a reporter at a small newspaper in
Massachusetts. So I am not new to criticism of the media. I have mostly
welcomed it, particularly the constructive criticisms, which motivate me and my
colleagues to strive to improve what we do. Critics help us be accountable.

But in recent years, a particularly strident
criticism of a so-called monolithic “mainstream media” has flourished on
certain blogs, talk shows and social media sites -- and even on the reader
comment sections of many of these same “mainstream media” outlets, including my own. People are
exercising their First Amendment rights, which is a good thing.

What is not a good thing is commentary that holds the “mainstream media” to be comprised of lying scoundrels pushing
a traitorous agenda, to put it bluntly. Not nearly as bluntly as some of the
rants I’ve witnessed, but, yes, bluntly.

My educated guess is that I have known many more
members of the media -- personally and professionally -- than any of these
critics, some of whom embrace the cowardly approach of anonymous commentary. I
have worked for almost 35 years with journalists, hundreds in total, and thus have been
intimately exposed to their methods, their personalities and their beliefs.
Some are now at large outlets, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Some remain at regional or local companies. Many sit alongside me today at 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. A few have left
the profession.

I do not know of a single one who has lied in his
or her journalism or pushed an unsavory agenda. More on agenda in a moment.

Do we in the media make mistakes? Yes, just as mechanics, lawyers, clerks and pretty much everybody makes mistakes. People are
fallible.

Should we be called on these mistakes? Of course.
And we are, regularly.

Every newspaper with which I am familiar not only accepts
corrections but solicits them. My own, The Providence Journal, runs a notice every day on page
2 stating that we willingly correct all errors (and we do), with instructions
on how to report them; daily, we publish letters to the editor and allow
readers to post online. Still dissatisfied? You can submit an op-ed piece or
demand a meeting with an editor or reporter. Does your local bank or grocer go
this far to give you a say?

And when confronted with an error, every reporter
I have ever known not only has set the record straight, in print or on air --
in public, and, in the internet era, in perpetuity -- he or she has been embarrassed and troubled at the failure. Then learned from it and moved on, vowing to do
better. These are people of honor who would do this.

There is, of course, that handful of actual lying
journalists, although, to the best of my knowledge, I am not personally acquainted with any. Nearly all are eventually caught and exiled from the business by ––
well, by fellow journalists, the editors who employed them. The most recent
example is ex-Cape Cod Times reporter Karen Jeffrey, who was fired by the
newspaper late this year when an internal review confirmed that she had
fabricated characters and events in several of her stories. What I find most revealing about
this episode is that the editor and publisher of The Cape Cod Times not
only fired Jeffery, but published a front-page story explaining what had
happened and apologizing to their readers. (Disclosure: I worked at
The Cape Cod Times from 1979 - 1981, leaving before Jeffrey was hired.)

This shameful story of one lying reporter at one
small newspaper became national news. It did precisely because such instances
are so rare.

**********

Now, about this monolithic “mainstream media.”

There is no such thing. There never was. As long
as the First Amendment holds, there never will be.

True, there are outlets that generally favor certain
stories and political philosophies over others. Fox v. MSNBC is a well-known
example. But is this monolithic when America has thousands of publications and
broadcast outlets -- and now, in the Internet era, so many blogs and web sites
-- each with its own raison d'être, and each managed by different local owners,
parent companies, or regional and national chains?
Hardly. If you want monolithic “mainstream media,” look to North Korea, Iran or the old
Soviet Union, not here. Different blood runs through American veins, and has
since before our independence was declared.

The American press took root at a time, the late
1700s and early 1800s, when the primary goal of many editors and writers -- perhaps most -- was to advance
specific politics, not offer balance, opposing points of view, or even what we
now call news. Thomas Paine’s pamphlets and other publications relentlessly
pushed independence from England; in New York, the Gazeteer espoused
loyalty to the crown. The Founding Fathers adopted the Bill of Rights with the
realization that a free press meant that those who managed and owned the presses (they were literally that: printing presses) would
continue with their overtly partisan writing. And they did, as Hamiltonian
readers of Federalist publications and Jeffersonian readers of Republican
papers, two groups frequently at odds, could have attested.

The advent of the telegraph changed journalism, as did the establishment of the Associated
Press in 1846, both helping to create the concept of news as we more or less
understand it today -- and diluting, if not removing, the agenda-driven
philosophy of the late colonial and early republic periods. Later technologies
-- radio, TV and digital -- had their profound effects. So did the rising
wealth of the industrializing nation, which supported increased advertising
revenues, which in turn supported larger and more diverse staffs -- and many
more publications, stations, networks, wire services and more. Not exactly a
monolith, then or now. (For an exhaustive history of the American press, I
recommend Christopher B. Daly’s COVERING AMERICA: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism).

But, yes, some outlets today do have an agenda,
broadly speaking -- an echo, if you will, of the opinionated press that
Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington and Madison knew well. Fox offers a
conservative view, MSNBC a liberal one; The Wall Street Journal
generally speaks for the business community, The New York Times for the
intelligentsia, the New York Post for the working man. Is there anyone who
follows the news who doesn’t know this? But many more newspapers, magazines and
broadcast outlets fall into more neutral territory, with diverse and sometimes
conflicting points of view expressed throughout their content –– and pure dogma
relegated, for the most part, to columns and the editorial and op-ed sections,
clearly identified as such.

What media-bashers really mean by agenda is:
something they read or hear that challenges or refutes their own views. I suspect what they really would like is their own monolith, where opposition did not exist.

This holds true for people on both sides of the
political divide, but in my experience, it’s more commonly an assertion by some
on the far right. They see a broad conspiracy by large numbers of individual
journalists who, they believe, are determined to undermine the nation by
promulgating “socialist” policies. They assert that “mainstream media”
reporters, editors, publishers and broadcasters want to destroy marriage, swell
the welfare rolls, ruin health care, take all the guns away, flood the country
with illegal immigrants, over-regulate business, punish the rich, demonize the Republicans,
ridicule the conservatives, spread myths about the environment, remove God from
everywhere, and the list goes on.

And to that end, they believe that
“mainstream” journalists twist, distort and lie. What they really mean is that
only members of any medium who are lock-step with their own opinions are
truthful.

I have yet to hear a credible explanation of how
so many journalists, spread across this sprawling country of 315 million, could
conspire on such a scale. Perhaps by their oaths at the annual Skull and Bones
gathering? Seriously, if there is one thing I have learned about my colleagues,
it’s that virtually without exception, they are stubborn (and sometimes ornery)
individualists. If you have ever attended a meeting of a news staff, you know what
I mean. Individualism seems to be written into our genes.

Providence Journal newsroom meeting

**********
With
individualism comes conviction. And while there are certainly aimless
journalists, most of the many I’ve known hold strong beliefs about important things.
They did not get into journalism to achieve celebrity or become rich, Lord
knows.

These people I know believe in a well-informed citizenry. They
believe in righting wrongs, and in giving voice to the voiceless, and in
advancing social justice. They believe in exposing corruption, in explaining new or
difficult subjects, in writing what has sometimes
been called the first draft of history. They believe in the value of sports,
entertainment, the arts, fashion, and good health, fun and food. They believe in the power of
storytelling and a journalist's vital role in sustaining the public discourse, our
birthright as Americans. They believe in taking readers and viewers (and
themselves) to places they ordinarily don’t go. Some put their lives at risk:
war correspondents, notably, who believe that only independent reporting gets
to the truth.

These are the women and men of the mainstream
media I know. They are people of professional integrity engaged in commendable enterprise. In their chosen field, they are disciplined, hard-working, energetic, intellectually
curious, skeptical, sometimes cantankerous or tempestuous, and deeply committed
to a bedrock principle of our democracy: free speech.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

I live near an airport. Depending on wind
direction and other variables, planes sometimes pass directly over my house as
they climb into the sky. If I’m outside, I always look up, marveling at the
wonder of flight. I’ve witnessed many amazing developments -- the end of the
Cold War, the advent of the digital world, for example -- but except perhaps for
space travel, which of course is rooted at Kitty Hawk, none can compare.

I also always think of my father, Roger L. Miller,
who died ten years ago today.

Dad was a boy on May 20, 1927, when Charles
Lindbergh took off in a single-engine plane from a field near New York City.
Thirty-three-and-a-half hours later, he landed in Paris. That boy from a small Massachusetts
town who became my father was astounded, like people all over the world.
Lindbergh’s pioneering Atlantic crossing inspired him to get into aviation, and
he wanted to do big things, maybe captain a plane or even head an airline. But
the Great Depression, which forced him from college, diminished that dream. He
drove a school bus to pay for trade school, where he became an airplane
mechanic, which was his job as a wartime Navy enlisted man and during his
entire civilian career. On this modest salary, he and my mother raised a
family, sacrificing material things they surely desired.

My father was a smart and gentle man, not prone to
harsh judgment, fond of a joke, a lover of newspapers and gardening and birds,
chickadees especially. He was robust until a stroke in his 80s sent him to a
nursing home, but I never heard him complain during those final, decrepit
years. The last time I saw him conscious, he was reading his beloved Boston
Globe, his old reading glasses uneven on his nose, from a hospital bed. The
morning sun was shining through the window and for a moment, I held the
unrealistic hope that he would make it through this latest distress. He died
four days later, quietly, I am told. I was not there.

Like others who have lost loved ones, there are
conversations I never had with my Dad that I probably should have. But near the
end, we did say we loved each other, which was rare (he was, after all, a
Yankee). I smoothed his brow and kissed him goodbye.

So on this 10th anniversary, I have no deep
regrets. But I do have two impossible wishes.

My first is that Dad could have heard my eulogy,
which I began writing that morning by his hospital bed. It spoke of quiet wisdom
he imparted to his children, and of the respect and affection family and others
held for him. In his modest way, he would have liked to hear it, I bet, for
such praise was scarce when he was alive. But that is not how the story goes.
We die and leave only memories, a strictly one-way experience.

My second wish would be to tell Dad how his only
son has fared in the last decade. I know he would have empathy for some bad
times I went through and be proud that I made it. He would be happy that I
found a woman I love: someone, like him, who
loves gardening and birds. He would be pleased that my three children are
making their way in the world, and that he now has two great-granddaughters,
wonderful little girls both. In his humble way, he would be honored to know how
frequently I, my sisters and my children remember and miss him. But that is not
how the story goes, either. We send thoughts to the dead, but the experience is
one-way. We treasure photographs, but they do not speak.

Lately, I have been poring through boxes of
black-and-white prints handed down from Dad’s side of my family. I am lucky to
have them, more so that they were taken in the pre-digital age -- for I can touch
them, as the people captured in them surely themselves did so long ago. I can
imagine what they might say, if in fact they could speak.

Some of the scenes are unfamiliar to me: sailboats
on a bay, a stream in winter, a couple posing on a hill, the woman dressed in
fur-trimmed coat. But I recognize the house, which my grandfather, for whom I
am named, built with his farmer’s hands; the coal stove that still heated the
kitchen when I visited as a child; the birdhouses and flower gardens, which my sweet
grandmother lovingly tended. I recognize my father, my uncle and my aunts, just
children then in the 1920s. I peer at Dad in these portraits (he seems always
to be smiling!), and the resemblance to photos of me at that age is startling,
though I suppose it should not be.

A plane will fly over my house today, I am
certain. When it does, I will go outside and think of young Dad, amazed that
someone had taken the controls of an airplane in America and stepped out in
France. A boy with a smile, his life all ahead of him.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Spent a few days on Deer Isle, one of my favorite places, and the setting for much of the novel I have been writing for years. Literally, for years. So I wrote some more, and I explored, and I kept a pictorial travelogue, in five parts, links below.

Look at the fresh flowers, Christmas wreathes, flags and more: On Deer Isle, the living do not forget the dead, many of whom died at sea or made their living there. Many also served their country. For more scenes from my Deer Isle travelogue, click here.